Lee Maelzer - The Last Light

About

"By about four am, when I am often awake with that sense of unwanted solitude that hour of the night lends us, there is usually just one light still on at the top right of the building. I used to think I was silently communing with a kindred spirit but it recently occurred to me that they might just like to leave the light on.”

The Last Light is a new moving image work by Lee Maelzer about compressed urban lives. Maelzer conceived this work in 2019 after moving into an east London council estate.

“It's a view of the tower block opposite. The vista is head-on to the drab, rectangular building. I always think that if you turned it, it would be as thin as a piece of paper. Nevertheless, the view gradually began to present something magical as I noticed the sleeping and waking rhythms of the invisible residents"

Although Maelzer is best known as a painter, she had experimented with film earlier: first at a residence in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 2007, where she made General Electric; and again in 2011 when she returned to film in Ground - a voyage through the spoils of a city street market at closing time from the eye level of a pigeon. Both works were to be understood as visual and aural experiences, closer to painting than cinema. Now Maelzer has again returned to moving image, but this time using a run of individual photographs (her earlier experiments had been made with filmed footage).

The photos are taken from the same spot, from a distance and through a window and are hence grainy images that become even more dissolute when projected. The placement and composition are not precise and so while it does function as an animated piece, the way its individual moments flicker and move reads like the memory of something glimpsed, as much felt as seen.

"I want this softened off, painterly look and no actual intrusion through to the rooms."

Like the two previous works, The Last Light is best understood through a painter’s gaze. There isn't a plot with characters to follow, instead the work is a visual contemplation of a setting, spaces she is drawn to, inhabited by unseen people, without making anything explicit: just the signs and rituals of close yet distant human lives. 

In the daytime shots, the shifting sky is all that breaks the stark monotony of the structure. Light hits the windows at dawn and dusk, giving them a silvery or golden sheen depending on the weather. As night falls and the building begins to illuminate from within, the effect becomes more graphic, like a Mondrian. The incandescent, fluorescent and television colours are like bright daubs on a dark canvas. The world at the centre of The Last Light has an almost musical quality as the lights go on and off and the occupants go about their lives and drop off the radar. 

The soundtrack to The Last Light was composed by Claudia Sacher.
 

The screening of The Last Light on Friday 28 May, will be followed by screenings of Ground and General Electric.

Ground, 2011, uses a camera affixed to a skateboard and pushed along with a crudely attached roller pole, we are invited on a tour around the bright scraps and detritus. The colours, heightened by the combination of autumn dusk and shop lighting, are super saturated against the soft mauve/grey of the birds. The audience can thrill at the tenacity of the scavengers and their discoveries or be horrified at their debasement. Dodging impervious footfall here and there, this is an empathic glance into the lives of those we chose to ignore as they scramble for survival.

General Electric is filmed in Pittsfield Massachusetts, where Maelzer was in residence in 2007. A place viewed through the eyes of a stranger, there is nevertheless a sense of recognition and familiarity in the motifs: drizzling rain on a car window, blurred freight trains passing through, graffitied parks and empty, static streets that were once a hub of industry. If a place can be said to be expectant, this captures it, poised for the next phase of human intervention. The final shot, a swinging, macabre scarecrow is an oddly optimistic touch. It is a halting, hazy journey around a city slowly recovering from its factories’ closure. The soundtrack to General Electric is an original work by Forever Autumn.